Oliver Brisson – Horizon Capiton LP (Nashazphone)

Nashazphone, 2018. “‘What is Normal Music?’ That was the title I chose for an article some years ago and despite the fact that I was searching something else, it was difficult to find anything better to start these lines about Horizon Capiton; the new LP by French musician Olivier Brisson. Monsieur Brisson lives in Lille and has been involved not only with sound experimentation but also with psychiatry. The latter is not just a detail but an important fact here: this is a work about frames and boundaries. But who (or what) are inside/outside those frames? That’s not easy to say. The sound collage brings us to a continuous flow where everything seems mixed: ‘professionals’ cataloguing ‘mental illness’, voices of ‘patients’, tape failures, suggestive music passages, anomalous noises, field recordings from everywhere and several rivers of sounds sailing together along with the listener. The trip is intense and compelling. Beautiful and terrifying. The horizon might be a cushion but it might be also something else. We’re culturally trained to believe that something is ‘normal’ or not and we put a lot of effort in trying to make the world fit in those categories. But in the end who is ‘normal’ enough to say what is ‘not normal’? This is what this record is about and Beware! Sound can easily break barriers, even those you didn’t notice were present.” —Anla Courtis, Buenos Aires, Argentina, December 2017